Tag: looking glass saga

I feel like I’ve written this post before, but I can’t seem to find it so here we go! I’ve been asked quite a few times about the origins of Return to Wonderland and The Looking Glass Saga as a whole, so it’s time to get it all down.

It started back in 2009 when Disney bout Marvel. It seems like a long time ago and arguably a good thing, but I was in comics back then ((Reviewed them on Youtube! And I worked at a comic shop!)) and I got to see the fallout that happened among the fanbase. People were pissed about the move, insisting that they were going to put Mickey Mouse ears on Wolverine and Disney-fy everything that they possibly could. It was considered a terrible move by a very large number of people and they thought the content would be sanitized to the point where it would be unrecognizable.

And I got really sick of listening to these people. Somehow in the annoyance of it all, I started getting an idea to turn things the other way and superimpose the Marvel Universe over Disney properties. I had a decent understanding of some franchises and a less good grasp of others, but ultimately there were a lot of weird parallels and crossovers created.

One of those was my Dr. Strange-inspired Alice in Wonderland. Here’s the thing to note about that. I am not that familiar with either Dr. Strange or the Alice in Wonderland Disney movie. I don’t think I’ve actually seen it. I read the book and absorbed the movie more or less through cultural osmosis. But I decided to do this mashup and do a take on it anyway.

Essentially, Wonderland turned into a parallel to that other dimension that Dr. Strange is in charge of and she was the protector of all that madness. It was a neat idea and I moved on to do all the princesses and mash them up with franchises I was more familiar with.

But the idea of that Alice story stuck with me and in the back of my head I kept revising it. It morphed and changed and I really liked the concept, but I didn’t have a fully formed story to put it to at the time. I had ideas, so many ideas, and nothing to do with them.

And then NaNoWriMo happened. I’ve told the particular story of that incident, but that was the last straw to getting the story written and put together. For me, at the time, a lot of figuring out what the tory was going to be happened by actually writing it and seeing if I liked where it was going, then turning it into a thing as I went along. And for Alice’s story, I ended up really liking some of it and wanting to continue it. I borrowed the Harry Potter structure and started laying in the groundwork for the longer series and I’ve been working on it ever since!

It’s been a weird trip. And now that I’ve got the first draft of the final book of the series done and it’s feeling like it’s getting close to done, I’m reminiscing more and more on how it started. It’s not very much like that initial origin, but there are glimmers still there and it’s fantastic to see.